by Ryder Stacy
With that it was off to the races with toasts by every man sitting around the table. There were toasts to great generals of the past, toasts to battles, toasts to presidents. After several more rounds, it was toasts to movie stars of the pre-nuke days, and then toasts to the banquet’s attendees, one by one.
If the intention of the feast was to get the top ranks of the two armies better acquainted, it was working. Dancing contests erupted, arm wrestling championships, and boxing matches as they went at it, testing each other’s skills, each other’s mettle as men. And being amazed at each nation’s prowess.
And as the men’s macho came out, so did the women’s machisma.
There’s something about knowing you might die on the morrow and consuming five, six, or seven high-proof drinks that sends one’s inhibitions into hibernation. As some of the men gyrated atop other tables, Rona took off her heavy boots jumped up right in front of Rockson, kicked the military maps aside, and began dancing, giving her lover obvious and wicked looks. Not to be outdone, Kim removed her clod-hoppers, leaped up and joined her several feet away. Both of them began spinning around as Freefighters and Sikh officers around the room joined in clapping hands in time to the now-pulsing odd but sensual music that had reached the decibel level of a symphonic orchestra.
Drinks were handed to the women and they gulped them down, while laughing, twirling around. Kim was the first to remove an article of clothing, her pants falling down, she stepped out of them. Rockson didn’t know whether to stop her.
Kim taunted, “Ashamed of your body, Rona?”
Rona tore off her freshly ironed fatigue jacket. The alcohol, the dizziness, the rising chorus of whistles pushed them both to heights they would never ordinarily have reached. But now, in a whirlwind of challenges back and forth, they stripped off one garment after another until both of them danced atop the table in just panties, swinging their bodies around like the dancing girls who continued to undulate through the crowd, diamonds in their navels and adorning the tips of their breasts, making the three points shine like shimmering stars in the oil-lamps’ lights.
Rock’s own brain was somewhere on the floor. He hadn’t drunk this much for years, but was already beyond the ability to judge or care. Somewhere in his head he knew they would regret this tomorrow—but now was a swirling fog of laughter, he had a stupid feeling that everything was fine. He watched the two near-naked women, the two bodies, each perfect in its own and unique way, swinging around, displaying themselves. Suddenly Kim stopped in her tracks, stiffened up, hiccupped once, and fell over. Her eyes closed before she hit the arms that caught her.
“She’s out cold,” Chen said, lowering her to the floor and covering her with a robe draped over a nearby chair.
“Gurl can’t hode her likor,” Rona said, coming to a stop from her whirling-dervish dance of flying red hair. “Gib me anudder.” She took the proffered drink, downed it in one swallow, smiled, and then she took a nosedive forward, falling into McCaughlin’s wide arms. The big Scot placed her alongside her rival and covered her and the two began snoring, probably dreaming of one another as their heads lay so close together.
“Well, the weaker sex, I see, has fallen by the wayside,” Panchali said. “And what of you, General Rockson, what are your drinking abilities? Are they beyond your beautiful concubines’ abilities?”
“Load me up,” Rock said with a corkscrew of a smile, “and we’ll see what happens.” They drank. And they drank some more. By 4:30 in the morning, there were but three men still conscious in the entire tent—Rockson, General Panchali, and Detroit. The trio sat around the table surrounded by bodies lying everywhere on the rug, snoring and groaning loudly. They had each drunk way, way too much exotic beverage but kept going, their eyes floating around inside their sockets like eggs looking for a frying pan.
“Now I’ll get the good stuff,” Panchali burped, stepping over the unconscious Ragdar, who had fallen long ago. He stumbled back a few seconds later with a small decanter that looked a thousand years old, poured each of them a glassful, and raised his own.
“To my whore of a mother and son-of-a-bitch of a father, who in their drunkenness, produced the greatest general the world has ever known.” They swallowed the stuff and their gullets nearly exploded as the triple-distilled coconut-gin blasted into their stomach linings like a phosphorus bomb. Detroit’s eyes rolled up like blinds on a spring and he tumbled backwards, out cold before he hit the ground.
“Looks lik ’s jus’ u ’n me now, Ger’l Rurkson,” Panchali said, standing up. “Les shee wich un’s the better man.” Holding the bottle in one hand, he walked, lurching from side to side, and cleared a space, kicking bodies around him out of the way. “Ere, Rurkson, drink fer drink, punch fer punch—til one man falls.”
“Soun’s like fun,” Rock said, wiping his hand over his face, trying to focus the waves of color and darkness that spun around him like a flock of tumbling birds. He somehow made it over to Panchali, stepping over numerous fleshy piles, and stood in front of him, waving slowly from side to side as if a wind were blowing him.
“U first.”
“No, I inshist,” Rock replied with a smile. “Yur in my country and Ahm yur ghuest. Please.” He put his hands behind his back and his chin out and closed his eyes. Panchali rolled up his long sleeves, wound up his right hand for about a minute, and then unleashed a powerhouse of a blow right into Rock’s jaw. The Doomsday Warrior flew backward, crashing over tables, rolling over bodies, and not stopping until he reached the edge of the tent where he slammed into it. He shook his head hard as if someone had just dropped a bucket of marbles into it and, remembering vaguely where and who he was, rose unsteadily to his feet. Seeing Panchali staring at him, hands on hips, Rockson waved and headed over.
“Well, I’ll be,” Panchali said with real surprise. Not a man had ever risen from his punch before. Somewhere in the heart of his drunken being, Panchali suddenly felt a surge of warmth and respect for the Freefighter. For some men, like Panchali, must be bested by a man before they can truly be the other’s friend. The general handed Rock another glassful of the nectar and they gulped it down.
“T’ink it’s my twern,” Rock said with an idiotic grin.
“Take your besh,” Panchali muttered, closing his eyes and jutting his jaw in the middle of the air. Rockson pulled his fist back to his ear and shot it forward like a spear. The blow hit Panchali on the right side of his jaw and sent him twisting and tumbling through the air as if riding an invisible wave. He crashed through numerous objects, at last coming to rest halfway through a trough that had been up for drinking water.
Rockson waited nearly a minute, standing in one position, his body bending back and forth like a stalk of wheat, deciding whether or not to fall. Hearing nothing from his erstwhile opponent, he yelled over.
“P’nchaki, P’nchaki, I’m reddy fur the nex’.” No one answered the request. “Well,” the Doomsday Warrior said, looking around the floor full of drunken fighters, “guezz I won.” With that he fell forward, his face landing dead center of a green silk pillow from which it didn’t move for ten hours.
Sixteen
Colonel Killov strode the outer walkway of the twelfth floor of the Army Command building in the center of Fort Minsk. His was the highest position in the fortress city and from it he scanned the surrounding land with a pair of Super-scope Infrared binoculars. He knew they were coming. Vassily, Zhabnov—they couldn’t just allow the KGB commander to take the whole thing over—not without a fight. Yet thus far . . . nothing. Killov was aware that they knew they would have to move soon or his hold over the entire Army apparatus would be complete. Already he had found out the location of five nuclear weapons and had taken possession of them. His plans were working out to a T. He was winning the Soviet power-struggle.
Yet within his churning guts acids of paranoia burned. For Killov had his own sixth sense—the intuition, the built-in warning system of the river rat. Far off to the east and south he could see some
fires burning. But they were just primitively armed rabble, his recon scout had reported. A bunch of horsemen with swords, camping out in the open. If they were planning an attack, they would be hidden. Let them try. Killov laughed derisively into the wind. Yes, it would be amusing if those rag-tag mountain primitives tried to take this fort—with its twenty-foot-thick walls of concrete, its racks of heavy artillery and machine guns, auto-controlled and fired. Cannons against swords, tanks against horses. It would be amusing.
The Blackshirt commander reached inside his leather jacket and extracted a vial from which he took three Heighten-All’s—a slightly hallucinogenic drug—for he wanted to add a bit of color to his vision. Just in case they came. Just in case the shells roared out red-and-blue and the bodies died like butchered dogs on the battlefield. He wanted to experience it all in psychedelic technicolor. He swallowed them down with a gulp from a small flask of vitamin-fortified vegetable juice—his one concession to his wasting flesh—and continued on his way around the wooden ramparts, which had been built in the early days of the fort as lookout towers. Though with the immense defensive capabilities of Minsk, they now seemed an anachronism, artifacts that had long since become obsolete.
Within minutes he could feel the mild psychedelic wash into his veins and fill him with a tingling sensation. His pupils began dilating, letting in more light to the chemical-saturated brain. The whole sky seemed to go by filled with galaxies of neon lights—like the ones in Moscow’s Nevsky-Playa, or on the seamy side of Washington, D.C., where Pig Zhabnov had allowed the negros to run their honky-tonk joints and whorehouses, so he and his men could have their fun. Killov’s mouth dropped open as the combined effects of the Heighten-All’s mixed with the twenty other things he had taken that day, all reacting to make his blood feel like it was boiling, his veins as if electric currents were shooting through them. He felt—woozy.
He fell backward, landing against the cushioned outer wall of his dimly-lit suite of rooms. Feeling all his strength ooze out of him like sap, he slid down to the floor in a semi-daze. He shook his head, trying to come out of the mood, and then reached up and slapped himself hard ten times. Stars, galaxies, in a rush.
“There, that’s better,” the Blackshirt leader laughed. He could handle his drugs. Better than any goddamned man alive. Just needed a second or two to adjust. Now he felt wonderful, grand. His arteries swelled like the oceans, sending a tide of swooning sensations through his body. He slowly lifted the glasses again, barely moving, taking twenty seconds to bring them to his face. He tilted them up toward the flashing neon signs in the sky. The lights of the nebulas and star systems filled the glasses and poured into his maddened brain in a waterfall of images. He saw the actual meaning of his life.
“Incredible, incredible,” the KGB master mumbled through lips as dried out as the back of an iguana standing on the equator. The stars filled him like messages from the dark gods at the far side of the universe. The glasses suddenly seemed to catch hold of an ultra-darkness, surrounded by swirling masses of burning diamonds. Killov tried to peer into it—into the void which called to him from a trillion light years off.
Yes, he could see—the magnetic circles of black flame pulling tighter and disappearing into a blackness that had no light. The drugs fully entered his system and in his hallucinations he was transported through the vast reaches of frozen space and into the spiraling darkness that burned deep with the star mass. He was moving in it now, part of it. And it was pure. Pure blackness. Without a trace of good or positive motion. Everything fell into it, everything went down. Down into the deepest of nowheres. Down into the dimension from which nothing—neither sun nor human soul—ever returns. And instinctively, Killov knew that this was his place of birth—his home. That he was a child of the blackness, that his flesh, his blood was made of that antimatter, that anti-life. For he was entropy—in a human form. A super-concentrated manifestation of that energy which made things lose their life forces, run down, come apart at the seams. He—he was the Death Energy of the entire planet, meant to fall apart over billions of years—and now compressed into one man who would take it all with him. In a second. In a flash. The Earth. A nova of black fire in the galactic night. And Killov would accomplish what countless millions of years of erosion and decay, of atmospheric leakage and volcanic eruption, could not. The shattering of every atom on the planet earth—a destruction so complete that nothing would ever know it had been there.
In his madness, Colonel Killov, his mouth wide open with the stupefied drooling grin of an infant just fed at its mother’s breast, joined with the darkest spectrums of the galactic night and charged himself with its destructive powers. For his food was nothing less than the atoms of pure evil of his own opium-driven dreams.
Rockson awoke with a groan and instantly wished he hadn’t. The sound that was emitted through his jaws also jarred his skull, which throbbed as if a row of ice picks were being jabbed continuously in and out. He opened his eyes a millimeter at a time, trying not to wince from the light which sliced in, as that hurt, too. Where the hell was he? As his bloodshot orbs got to half mast, he saw the exotic designs on the wall-hangings across from him and then Detroit’s sorry-looking face nursing a cup of hot coffee, his lips so deep into the hot steaming cup that his whole mouth seemed to disappear. The cup was lowered.
“Yo’ bro’,” Detroit whispered over from the table. “Have some coffee?” He pointed slowly with a trembling finger to another cup sitting next to him.
“What the hell—” Rock began and then winced again, his entire face sucking in like a prune from the exquisite pains that shot through him.
“Blood pressure, Rock, blood pressure,” Detroit said as if he had just gone through it all himself. “Don’t even try to think or say a word until you’ve had at least five cups of coffee—then we’ll talk about it.”
Heeding the advice, Rockson rose, taking one slow step at a time as if he were walking on rice paper, and deposited himself with a jarring thump in the chair next to the Freefighter. The coffee burned his lips but he could feel it cut through the drunken cobwebs in his skull instantly.
After the fourth sip, Rockson slowly surveyed the inside of the banquet tent. It was a wreck, as if a herd of elephants or at least water buffalo had thought it was the local wading pool and come to do some splashing. Everything in sight was cracked, broken, or crushed to a pulp. Trays of overturned food and bowls of squashed fruit lay in wild abandon of no particularly order or reason. Suddenly Rock realized that he and Detroit were the only ones in the place.
“Where the hell,” he began again, rising up angrily in his seat, the blood shooting to his skull like the mercury in a thermometer when placed over an open flame. He came down again with a groan.
“I’ve been shot in the head and it’s better than this,” Rock said, turning and looking at Detroit, eyes tearing slightly. “But where, may I ask,” Rock said as softly and calmly as he could, “is everyone else?”
“Gone, Rock,” Detroit answered, reaching for another cup of black liquid.
“What the hell—?” By now the Pavlovian response of being rewarded with pain made Rock stop voluntarily as he mouthed the third word—but it was too late as another wall of little razor blades slammed down on the softest part of his brain tissue. Twenty seconds later, he asked again, this time in a whisper.
“Tell me, pray tell—where did they go?”
“To the battle site, Rock—but cool down, pal,” Detroit said, holding his hand up, “we got plenty of time. You and me—we drank that blue stuff. That’s why we’re here—and everyone else split. Stuffs strong, Rock. My head feels like it fell into the receiving basket for a guillotine.”
“If they start that battle without me I’ll kill the bastards,” Rock said between clenched teeth, trying to fool his blood pressure. He didn’t. Detroit told Rock that Rona and Kim were sleeping it off in the next tent. Rock stole a peek, and was satisfied.
Half an hour later, both men headed haltingl
y outside and found their ’brids tied to a post. There was still activity in the Sikh camp, men manning kitchens and command tents—but clearly the bulk of the army was gone. They rode through the woods, going eight miles out of the way to reach the northern approach to Minsk. Here the going got really rough as the ground became cratered with sharp, cutting coral-like rock formations that even the ’brids, with their thick shoes and hooves, had a hard time maneuvering. Slowly Rock’s headache vanished as he stretched out his arms and legs, twisting the muscles this way and that while he rode, trying to work them free of a thousand kinks.
Rona was the first to stir. She sat up sharply. “Where am I?—Oh!” She remembered the near-naked dance she had done with—“Kim!” she shouted, shaking the blonde lying next to her awake. “Hurry up—we’re going to miss the battle!”
Kim moaned and sat up. She focused her eyes on the redhead who continued. “Hurry! We need some clothes.”
They looked around, found their combat fatigues and liberator rifles on an oak chest.
While they dressed, Rona said, “Kim, we—one of us might die out there today—I think—”
“Yeah,” Kim smiled. “Let’s shake on it. If we live, we’ll work something out—about Rock. I’ve grown fond of you—” She bit her lip.
“And I of you, Kim. Let’s be friends—”
With a handshake, they declared a personal truce, then left the tent.
By the time he and Detroit reached Panchali’s and Ragdar’s forces hidden in woods a half mile from the northern reach, the sun was setting fast and Rock’s guts were finally sorting themselves out.
“Ah, General Rockson,” Panchali said with a broad grin as the Doomsday Warrior rode up and dismounted. “We wondered if you were going to make it at all.”
“I better not find out you put poison or something in that juice you were feeding me last night,” Rock said as he looked around at the Sikh forces which spread far back into the woods, taking in the rows of archers, horsemen, and the immense devices that the generals had built.